Page:Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile - In the Years 1768, 1769, 1770, 1771, 1772, and 1773 volume 1.djvu/500

388 spices, hunting in the season to provide himself with ivory; and food throughout the winter. His mountains, and the cities he built afterwards, were situated upon a loomy, black earth, so that as soon as the tropical rains began to fall, a wonderful phænomenon deprived him of his cattle. Large swarms of flies appeared wherever that loomy earth was, which made him absolutely dependent in this respect upon the shepherd, but this affected the shepherd also.

insect is called Zimb; it has not been described by any naturalist. It is in size very little larger than a bee, of a thicker proportion, and his wings, which are broader than those of a bee, placed separate like those of a fly; they are of pure gauze, without colour or spot upon them; the head is large, the upper jaw or lip is sharp, and has at the end of it a strong-pointed hair of about a quarter of an inch long; the lower jaw has two of these pointed hairs, and this pencil of hairs, when joined together, makes a resistence to the finger nearly equal to that of a strong hog's bristle. Its legs are serratcd in the inside, and the whole covered with brown hair or down. As soon as this plague appears, and their buzzing is heard, ail the cattle forsake their food, and run wildly about the plain, till they die, worn out with fatigue, fright, and hunger. No remedy remains, but to leave the black earth, and hasten down to the sands of Atbara, and there they remain while the rains last, this cruel enemy never daring to pursue them farther.

enables the shepherd to perform the long and toilsome journies across Africa is the camel, emphatically called by the Arabs, the ship of the desert. He seems to have been created for this very trade, endued with parts and

qualities